Stay With Me
by Ayobami Adebayo
Nomination: Orange Finalist 2017
Date Read: December 21, 2021
Stay With Me explores the boundaries of marriage, infertility, and honesty against a backdrop of a crumbling Nigeria. Akim and Yejide are relatively happy in their marriage. The only glaring problem is they have no children after 6 years of marriage. While the both of them are learning to live with this fact, Akim’s mother is not having it. She’s not having it to the point of finding him another wife.
This intrusion into their marriage isn’t welcomed by either Akim or Yejide. Yejide realizes the only way to get this interloper out of her marriage is to get pregnant and fast. So she does what any good Nigerian does – she goes to the local shaman. And voila! She looks like a pregnant woman, eats like a pregnant woman, waddles like a pregnant woman. But, alas, so desperate is she to get pregnant that her psyche actually manifests this desire in her physical body.
From here, everything seems to fall apart. Yejide is seduced by Akim’s brother, Dotun. Not long after, Yejide falls pregnant again, this time for real. The morning after their daughter’s naming ceremony, the second wife, Funmi, is found dead at the bottom of the stairs. We learn later that Akim, in a drunken state and being mercilessly teased by Funmi, pushed her down the stairs.
But their elation will be short-lived as their daughter dies from what appears to be SIDs when she is only a few months old. Akim is devastated but Yejide is inconsolable. Her mourning is so deep and so vast that it seems as if she will never be able to climb out of the abyss.
Her affair with Dotun continues and not long after their loss, Yejde is pregnant, this time with a boy. Because both parents are now overly cautious about their children’s health, they take their son for a full check-up. The doctor, as kindly and diplomatically as he can, tells Akim that their son has Sickle Cell Anemia, which could not have come from his side, therefore Akim is not the father of their son. Akim pretends to be upset by this news but he is shockingly stoic.
Not long after this diagnosis, their son passes away in a world of pain and suffering. Once again, Yejide is overcome, as any mother would be. But Akim never confronts her about the paternity of their dead son.
Over the course of the rest of the novel, we learn that Akim is impotent and has never had proper sex with his wife. Akim actually put his brother up to getting Yejide pregnant but their affair continued without his knowledge. Yejide finds out about all of this and is bitter and angry. She is also pregnant again with another daughter.
With Akim and Yejide barely speaking, Yejide distances herself from her daughter because she knows this daughter also has SCA and she cannot endure the loss of another child. She continually hands her baby off to others to hold and ignores her as much as possible. When Akim and Yejide are forced to head to opposite parts of Nigeria, Yejide insists that Akim take their daughter with him to Lagos while she goes to her friend’s hometown.
In Lagos, everything is falling apart with the military running through the streets and shooting at anything that moves. It is precisely at this moment that their daughter has a SCA crisis. In a panic, Akim calls Yejide for advice, to see if she has been given any home remedies that he can use to keep their daughter alive. Yejide, bizarrely calm, tells him she is leaving and never coming back.
Years later, Yejide is invited by Akim to the funeral of Akim’s father. There she learns that their daughter didn’t die after all and in her desperate need to protect her heart from another loss, has given up raising her own child. Out of kindness and still a great deal of love, Akim invites Yejide home to live with them.
Although this has a beautiful yet sad ending, there are no winners here. This path of suffering and lies led to so much pain and you can trace the beginnings of it back to Akim’s mother. It’s like a cautionary tale of what a monster-in-law can actually do to a marriage.
Brilliant writing and a brilliant story. Adebayo is a writer to keep tabs on.
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